Asphyxiation
by Storm of Roses
Summary: '"There are so many horrible things in this dream," she murmured. "But I've seen beautiful things, too." Mars-san looked at her, filmy eyes full of tears.' One in a series of meetings, loosely connected to 'Lullaby.'


Masada's ship must have crashed, Madotsuki mused in a dreamy way, eyes closed and laying on her back, pressed up against harsh blood-colored rock and silken sand. Fires sparked and sputtered into life beyond her closed eyelids; the electrical fire, she imagined, must be eating the ship which was now little more than twisted sheet metal and struts, jumping on and gnawing at wires. That close to the fire, in the middle of the screaming wreckage, she could feel its warmth staving off the frigid martian atmosphere. She sighed gently, so close to death and so easily removed from fear, opened her eyes, and stood. She didn't know where Masada had gone, and only a temporary pang of sorrow touched her. All of this was a dream, she repeated to herself. All of it was a dream.

The sky was beautiful. Truthfully, it wasn't the sky, but space, the ever-reaching void beyond tinted with deep nameless colors and smeared with crystalline galaxies. The blaze reached up with desperate fingers to touch it, and with little care for anything but the stars, Madotsuki summoned the umbrella. She took the parasol into her left hand, tilted it over her head, and looked up. Summer rains began to fall, warm and smelling of flowers and quiet puddles in the street; tens of thousands of drops wailed and shrieked on snapping wires, soaked and ran down platinum, titanium, steel. She left the wreckage and its dying fire, wandering out into the cold world beyond as the craters and canyons of Mars flooded slowly with sun-warmed rain.

Madotsuki walked for hours, never tiring, for in her dreams, there were no limits that told her to be tired. And when she grew bored with wandering the surface of Mars, she delved into its caves, shrinking to fit through a crack in the rocky ground. Her body was water, slipping through dust and tiny openings with the ease of a serpent. And comfortably, with no trouble at all and a peaceful smile, she settled in the cool depths of Mars and reformed soundlessly. She had expected silence in the nameless caverns there, all smelling of ground-up crimson rock and smoke, but there was sound. Straining her sensitive hearing, Madotsuki walked with feather-light feet, following the faint echoes of sobbing, of tears hitting the floor near-silently. It was a sound that she was used to and couldn't forget.

She wandered again, weaving through stalactites and stalagmites, taking her time, for nothing changed in her dream world. The crying would not go unless she desired its going. She had endless hours to find its source, and if she woke up prematurely, she had been saving sleeping pills for a rainy day. Her addiction had certainly proven difficult to maintain; she required more pills than ever to fall asleep easily. Madotsuki mused on this as she walked, wondering just when she had come to depend on the drugs. Had it been her first trip to the Nexus? When she found Poniko and repeatedly visited? Maybe it was when she had discovered the witch effect and learned how to fly... Everything was a blur in the living world.

The smoke from before was strong now, a thick and acrid fog in the twisting tunnel Madotsuki navigated. She choked on the horrific smell, wondering how her mind had conjured up such a scent, and kept walking as she coughed. Her throat, already rough from disuse, hurt when she spasmed and hacked into her sleeve. She could barely see in the cramped tunnel, but kept walking, for the sound of crying was growing louder. After several minutes of blind stumbling, she emerged into a cavern filled with dull light and tarnished, twisted steel. Standing over the wreckage of metal was a tall, quivering figure.

Madotsuki coughed again into her pink sleeve and approached the wreck, paying little heed to the figure. It followed suit, its single great eye sliding over her in a mournful examination before turning once more to the pile of steel that the dreamer could now tell was a train. With only the sounds of Madotsuki's wheezing and the creature's quiet crying, the two stood side by side and watched the smoke rise from the smashed locomotive. It curled slowly up from singed corpses and melting metal, quivering and clinging near the alien's massive eye and around its head. Hours may have passed in that reverent silence. In the end, Madotsuki wasn't sure how long it was.

"What should I call you?" Madotsuki asked at last, looking up at the alien. Her voice cracked and she had to cough a few times before it returned. The alien's eye, a sickly green color and faintly filmy, watched her struggle with her breath. It blinked, and a tear trickled downwards. "Do you have a name?"

There was no answer, as usual, and Madotsuki had expected that. She had named almost everything in the dream world by herself. "I think I'll call you Mars-san," she said at last. Mars-san blinked and looked at the train wreck. The sobbing in the room came not from him, but from the cavern itself, like it emanated from the very stones. Madotsuki sat down beside his single foot and leaned her chin on her hands. "There are so many horrible things in this dream," she murmured. "Like this. Smoke. Disaster. The sounds of the city. Screeching metal and people, and hearing others cry." Mars-san looked at her again, filmy eyes full of tears. He shuffled closer to her, until his side pressed up against her. "But I've seen beautiful things, too," the dreamer continued softly. "I walked for eternities in the wastelands and found a stairway to the sky, where people fell from the clouds. I visit a girl named Poniko, and sometimes she looks at me like I exist. And somewhere out there is a patch of flowers that shine amidst a world of ghosts. Those are beautiful things. Here, this train and you- this is both. Horrible and beautiful. Why are you still here, Mars-san? You can leave. I want you to."

The alien figure, all the colors of a galaxy on his smooth skin, did not move. He looked at her mournfully, and then at the wreck. And somehow, Madotsuki understood. He truly couldn't go, for he didn't want to. And for all of her power in the dream world, she couldn't make him. There were more important things than her at work in that tiny, stifling cavern. This was a vigil, a promise. A funeral.

There was so much smoke at this improvised funeral that Madotsuki was beginning to feel very buried herself, six feet under in gray fog. She leaned back, closing her stinging eyes, and wondered if this was what dying felt like. Slowly asphyxiating surely wouldn't be so bad. Already, she was beginning to lose track of what pain there had been. Just hazy colors now, and the calmest feeling of emptiness, and the renewed crying of Mars-san as he watched her smile in her sleep. But that crying shook her awake again.

"So many horrible, beautiful things," she whispered, and she cupped her own cheek with one hand, stroking a tear away with a fingertip, tracing spirals into her skin. "Sometimes, I see things in this dream that make me think. Sometimes they're parts of me. I don't know what you are, Mars-san. You don't scare me, or make me upset. I see you and I miss something. Maybe it's the beautiful parts of the world that you remind me of. The sad, lovely things." All of Mars listened, and the alien beside her shuddered. "You're like the people who put flowers on graves that belong to people they don't know. The animals that guard their masters out of love and devotion. I don't miss much of the world, but those are the kind of things that I remember liking."

And the fragile girl sighed, watching her smoky breath plume like a dragon's fire. "I don't want to be sad anymore," she murmured, and she closed her eyes. "So I'm going to wake up. Goodbye, Mars-san." She pinched her own cheek sharply, let the pain register in a dull ache, and let herself drift down, down, down until she jerked upwards, awake.

Her same dusty room greeted her with twilight shadows, the roar of the traffic below leaping onto the balcony beyond her glass door. Stiff from hours of drugged sleep, Madotsuki rose, thin white sheets billowing off of her skinny form as she left the warmth of her bed. An autumn chill bit at her exposed fingers, at her eyes and bare feet when she slid the door open. She didn't bother to contain her shivering, nor did she care about the cold. She simply stood, looking over her railing at the streets below. How far below the cars were, like red and white light-ants that stood end-to-end. With a deadened sense of curiosity, Madotsuki leaned out over the railing, the edge of it pressing uncomfortably against her midsection as she rested half-suspended over that strip of racing light. A gentle wind blew, the girl's eyes closed, and she drifted further, leaning out more and more.

_Like flying… Almost there, almost… You have to fall before you can fly._

And slowly, slowly, Madotsuki began to smile. The cold was gone, and there was the most magnificent warmth below her, where she was going. Just a few more seconds, and-

A train wailed out a lonesome cry, and Madotsuki froze, pitched forward on the railing with an inch to spare before the point of no turning back. On that cold autumn night, there was nothing more haunting, more _beautiful _than the awful scream of that engine. And crying, sobbing, Madotsuki sank back to the balcony's rough concrete floor, curling into a miserable pile of skin and bones and fading, fluffy pink sweater. The asphalt grain cut into her cheek, and she caressed the rough surface with trembling hands. Simultaneously, she was higher up than ever, millions of miles from the lives of the people below her, and in Hell millions of miles below that wretched ground they walked on. She shivered, and was grateful for her empty and lonely apartment; no one would hear her crying. The glass door was still open. The heat drained out. The city screamed with laughter and sorrow and rage and joy and noise! The train wailed again and faded into the distance.

Madotsuki stayed there for as long as she could bear the cold, which wasn't too long, by her estimate. She picked herself up and bolted the glass door behind her once she was inside, where it was hardly warmer than it had been outside. Not wasting time, she rummaged through her bathroom cabinet, pulling out a half-full bottle of sleeping pills and downing three. Barely seeing her bed, she slipped into it and shivered under the sheets and thick blankets. It took only a few minutes before the medications took effect, and Madotsuki slipped into unconsciousness, her ironic bastion of safety. Outside of the sliding glass door, smoke curled up in tendrils from the desperate city.


End file.
